Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to governed objects in a service registry and more particularly to the transitioning of governed objects in a service registry.
Description of the Related Art
The reuse of services greatly depends on the ability to describe and publish the offered functionality of the services to potential consumers. A service registry supports the organization of information about services and provide facilities to publish and discover services. Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), together with the simple object access protocol (SOAP) are standards for describing services and their providers, as well as how services can be consumed.
The service registry provides functionality to store and retrieve service-metadata. In this regard, WSDL, extensible markup language (XML) schema definition (XSD), and service component architecture (SCA) modules and policy documents can be loaded and parsed into separate entities. For example with a WSDL document, separate entities are created for service, binding, portType and the like. XML and binary documents can be loaded as single entities. These entities can then be decorated with additional data in the form of properties, classifications and relationships.
Of note, entities within a service registry can be managed using lifecycles defined according to State Adaptive Choreography Language (SACL) in order to provide service governance. The lifecycle can track the state of a service, for example through development, testing, quality assurance and production, allowing for approval and checks before moving to the next stage. As such, “governed objects” within a service registry are entities or instantiation of entities that have associated therewith a lifecycle. Further, governed objects experience the lifecycle by way of different states and transitions therebetween. As such, lifecycle states and transitions defined for a governed object in a service registry uniquely identifies the nature of the governance framework in an organization.
A shortcoming in the current lifecycle definitions of governed objects in service registries is the ability to transition objects from one state to the other driven by policies in an automated way. In other words, based on the result of a policy or policy sets, an object in the service registry automatically moves from its current state to the next state. Yet, the manual nature of the number of checks on each service version object which relates to interfaces, operations, input, output, charters and the like and then the transitioning of the object from one state to the other based on these checks is a painfully laborious, time consuming and inefficient process. Consequently, the service registry can become unusable for the customer, as the number of services in use by the customer increases.